He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box had its world premiere Off-Broadway in February of 2018 at Theatre for a New Audience in New York.
Kennedy is an American playwright best known for her play Funnyhouse of a Negro which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award.
Kennedy is known for her use of surrealism in her plays and drawing on mythical, historical, and imaginary figures to depict and explore the African-American experience. Much of her work is based on her lived experiences.
Kennedy’s other plays include: A Rat’s Mass, Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired By His Death, A Beast Story, and a play cycle known as The Alexander Plays (She Talks to Beethoven, The Ohio State Murders, The Film Club, and The Dramatic Circle)
Kennedy is the recipient of many awards for her plays, including:
Obie Awards: for Distinguished Play for Funnyhouse of a Negro and Best American Play for both June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber.
A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Obie Awards in 2008.
A Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1967.
A Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1967 and again in 1970.
A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972.
The Creative Artists Public Service Grant in 1974.
The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in 2003.
The 2003 Pierre Lecomte du Nouy Award.
In 1994, she won the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award and an American Academy of the Arts and Letters award in Literature.
In 2006, Kennedy received the Pen/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist.
Kennedy was named the playwright in residence at Signature Theater Company in New York City from September 1995 - May 1996.
Kennedy has taught at Yale University, Princeton University, Brown University, UC Berkeley, Harvard University, Stanford University, New York University and UC Davis.
In 2003, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by her undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State University.
In 2018, Kennedy was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
